Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe Paperback – April 6, 2021

As someone well into their senior years my reading passions have spanned the topics from A to Z and from the scientific to the esoteric. Several years ago, I had read “The Elegant Universe” and enjoyed the book.This is why when I saw this 430-page hardcover edition (Until the end of time: Matter and our search for meaning in an evolving universe by Brian Greene) on Amazon I decided to purchase it.First off, you should be aware that this is not what you would call “a recreational read.” The author is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University and in this volume, he explores some heavy scientific and intellectual topics.Even though he writes beautifully and makes his ideas come alive; nevertheless, this book reads like a college level textbook on physics and cosmology. In fact, there are 99 pages of detailed notes at the end of the book if you decide to do more research on the topics.The subjects covered in this huge book covers “The lure of eternity, the language of time, origins and entropy, information and vitality, particles and consciousness, language and story, brains and belief, instinct and creativity, duration and impermanence, the twilight of time and the nobility of being.”In conclusion, I enjoyed reading this book very much and recommend it to those who may have read his best seller (The elegant universe).Rating: 5 Stars. Joseph J. Truncale (Author: Tactical principles of the most effective Combative Systems).

Brian Greene allows us into his private world, he’s brilliant, so it is a fun place to go and visit. In spite of being brilliant, he is not much different from us. For the love of pizza, when 10 years old, he blew up his mother’s kitchen (p. 57-58). Yes, brilliant but like all of us, he has moments of being stupid. His open and exposed approach makes me want to read on. He loves math and wants to go deep into physics. But beyond that shiny collegiate surface he also wants to go much deeper. His older brother has taken a spiritual path (dancing with Hare Krishna p. 203) but on some level he knows his path towards truth is not the same as his older brother.How does science then, without any beliefs get to the promised land? How does Brian find the inner peace that his brother is dancing to? Of course, it would take 428 pages. But to lay out what appears to me to be his approach, he heads toward the open state Tibetans call Samadhi, but he doesn’t use any religious language. Samadhi isn’t a normal state of thinking thoughts to find answers, but a state of open contemplation beyond thought. Brian does this by expanding your mind, one idea at a time until you become wide open. You get your mind blown. He does all this with wisdom. Wisdom is what happens to you as time takes place. You, as you get older become wise, just because you are older. Brian doesn’t call it wisdom, he only uses time itself, vast amounts of time, and as you contemplate these vast lengths of time, you naturally sense or feel outside of time. Consciousness can use intuition to do that but a strictly logical mind can’t think it. So Brian gives us time to contemplate, and he guards us from having any beliefs.Beliefs are a problem, because once you have a belief, you can’t do science, you can’t pretend to be open minded, you get stuck. Once you get stuck, you are susceptible to fascism. Fascism happens when you think there is only one way. Fascism is a large part of religion, politics, and science. Once we get stuck, we get really stuck.Here we are at the start of a world pandemic, with an idiot president pointing at his accomplishments. All of this reality, kind of helps us to read this wonderful book. A book to fight fascism, and to feel the universe giving us a personal hug. Yes, we can all enter Samadhi together.

Brian Greene has done an excellent job of making the origins of the universe, quantum physics, entropy and various other nerdy topics both interesting and comprehensible. His through line is the origin of the universe and its ultimate demise billions of years out but that story is really an organizing principle for explaining a lot of science and talking a lot by how to think clearly about science and, in may ways, life. The book moved a long quickly and while there is some deep scientific exposition going on a lot of the time it never got boring or too difficult to follow. I could have done with less of the details of the eventual disintegration of the universe which will take eons, but that's a minor complaint next to the large amount of wisdom and knowledge the book conveys.

I've read all of Brian Greene's books and they are always a mind-expanding experience. This one has less math than his others, and gets into subjects like morality and religion which are normally outside of a physicist's ken. As usual the writing is very entertaining and down to earth, not difficult to understand. His metaphor for long periods of time using the Empire State Building is quite useful. And like his last book, in which infinite space allows pretty much anything not logically impossible to exist (include not one, but infinite copies of ourselves and our own world), vast periods of time allow the improbable to become inevitable, including the random development of brains from patterns of particles, so-called Boltzmann brains. In fact, it is not easy to tell if our brains are in fact Boltzmann brains and our environment simply confabulated. This is the most mind-bending part of the book. But in the end the book is really about finding meaning from life knowing that we are simply masses of particles in particular patterns, doomed to die, just as the Universe someday is most likely to die as well. Along the way we stop briefly on the problem of consciousness, which discussion is unsatisfying as all discussions of consciousness inevitably are. Nevertheless this was an enlightening book. I have always loved books like this, ever since I was a boy and encountered George Gamow's 1 2 3 Infinity. I like the fundamental questions, even if the math and physics are far beyond me. Brian Greene excels at explaining the science at my level, and I appreciate that.